Judge tosses some statements made by husband accused of killing Staten Island wife

Advance file photoJohn Galtieri is led out of court during an appearance last year.

Nothing a former cop said to investigators after he asked for a lawyer following his arrest on charges of murdering his ex-wife in Staten Island will be admissible during trial, a judge ruled.

But any statements John Galtieri made to police prior to his request for an attorney when he was read his Miranda rights following his arrest in South Carolina last year are fair game.

"All the defendant's statements to the police before he invoked the right to counsel on Feb. 2, 2007 are not suppressed, and all the defendant's statements to the police after he invoked the right to counsel are suppressed," Justice Stephen J. Rooney wrote in his decision filed May 9 in state Supreme Court, St. George.

Galtieri, 61, a former NYPD sergeant, is accused of murdering his former wife, Jeanne Kane, as she sat in her vehicle waiting to pick up her daughter at a Pleasant Plains park-and-ride Jan. 30 last year.

Prosecutors allege that Galtieri waited in the park-and-ride's lot for five hours to murder Ms. Kane because he was enraged over a million-dollar divorce settlement awarded in 2003.

The settlement included $400,000 in damages tacked on by a judge who determined that Ms. Kane was a battered wife.

The day after Ms. Kane was found dead in her car with a gunshot wound to her head, Galtieri was picked up in South Carolina on I-95 as he was driving back to his home in Punta Gorda, Fla.

"What's going on? What's this all about?" Galtieri allegedly asked a lieutenant with the Colleton County Sheriff's Department when he was pulled out of his car on the side of the highway.

Two days later during an interview session while waiting for detectives Guy Gazzillo and Thomas Joyce from the Staten Island Homicide Squad to show up, Galtieri told a South Carolina cop "he believed [Ms. Kane] poisoned two of [his] dogs" when the couple separated.

Galtieri reportedly told Gazzillo that he was in Staten Island on the day of the murder because he was filing a lawsuit against the NYPD pension fund.

Claiming his ex-wife "garnished" his $2,777 pension check, Galtieri said he was so insulted by the pension check he received for $7, he wrote "[bleep] you" on the bottom of the check and sent it back, according to the judge's details of facts included in his decision.

Galtieri said he was at the courthouse from 9 a.m. that day to nearly 12:30 p.m. After driving to St. George in a failed attempt to look for a process server, Galtieri told Gazzillo he decided to head home to Florida, but first found a spot underneath the West Short Expressway on Woodrow Road and took a nap in his car.